Béla Fleck stretches out with cross-cultural trio

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      Inspired by ancient African traditions and made possible by European metallurgy, the five-string banjo should by rights be the national instrument of the United States. Yet to most people, both here and in the land of its birth, it’s still associated with toothless hillbillies, tarpaper shacks, and old-fashioned mountain music.

      Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course: it was early exposure to the Beverly Hillbillies theme song that introduced the banjo’s reigning virtuoso, Béla Fleck, to his chosen instrument, and he’s certainly spent his time in the bluegrass trenches. But for the past 20 years the New York City native has been working to deliver the banjo from such stereotypes—and, somewhat to his surprise, his efforts have given him the kind of career most musicians can only dream of.

      “I am so fortunate,” he says humbly, reached by phone at a Goshen, Indiana, tour stop. “I’m just in an unbelievably lucky situation.”

      It helps that Fleck can play just about anything with just about anybody. In the past couple of years alone, he’s explored the outer limits of progressive funk with his band the Flecktones; toured as a duo with jazz keyboard legend Chick Corea and in a trio with bass great Stanley Clarke and violinist Jean-Luc Ponty; pioneered a novel fusion of bluegrass and Chinese music with Abigail Washburn and the Sparrow Quartet; and assembled an all-star cast of musicians from Mali, Madagascar, Tanzania, and South Africa to illuminate his instrument’s African heritage. But the project that brings him to Vancouver this week might be his most musically demanding to date.

      “When I look at the quality of the people that I’ve collaborated with,” he says, “playing with Edgar Meyer and Zakir Hussain is right up there with anything I’ve ever done.”

      In part, that’s because the undertaking that brought the banjo player, the bassist, and the tabla virtuoso together was Fleck’s second venture into the world of orchestral music. Commissioned by the Nashville Symphony, their triple concerto The Melody of Rhythm is both an almost unprecedented amalgamation of western orchestration and South Asian beats and a surprise hit, having topped the Billboard classical charts for several weeks earlier this year. Jointly composed by the three musicians, with the conservatory-trained Meyer doing the brunt of the notation, the project was a stretch for them all.

      “With a lot of the writing, we’d get Zakir to present us with a series of rhythmic structures in different time signatures, and then Edgar and I would try to write melodies to them,” Fleck explains. “My job was to speak up if I thought we were getting too conceptual.

      “I’m not saying those guys are all about that,” he adds, “but I always try to do complicated music that doesn’t sound complicated, and that feels really earthy.”

      The process worked well enough that Fleck, Meyer, and Hussain are now a full-fledged band, and apparently their chart-topping CD—which includes a half-dozen trio numbers as well as the 30-minute concerto—only scratches the surface of what they’re capable of in performance.

      “When we recorded, we were just learning to play together,” says Fleck. “Now we’re playing this material every night, so we’re getting better at it and the improvisations are getting more and more interesting.”

      Béla Fleck, Edgar Meyer, and Zakir Hussain play the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts on Saturday (October 24).

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